Joshua Bennett. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.
Joshua Bennett is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was a winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His next book of creative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
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An excerpt from “Where Is Black Life Lived?”:
I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the role of air in African American letters. The people that could fly. Eric Garner. Christina Sharpe highlighting the link between anti-black racism and the weather. It bears remembering. For the legal studies scholar and foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell, one of the first characteristics of the black utopia he describes in his classic vignette, “Afrolantica Awakening,” is that it is simply a place where we can breathe. A space of celebration and retreat, somehow flourishing both inside and beyond the constraints of the present order. The sanctuary; the dancehall; my grandmother’s salon, glistening at a distance. When we turn to the written page, where is Black life lived? Anywhere. Everywhere. Underwater, outer space, underground. Even where there is no air at all. We imagine it as if it were otherwise. We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in our joy.
An excerpt from The Study of Human Life:
“Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)”
……..with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
Months into the plague now, I am disallowed entry even into the waiting room with Mom, escorted outside instead by men armed with guns & bottles of hand sanitizer, their entire countenance its own American metaphor. So the first time I see you in full force, I am pacing maniacally up & down the block outside, Facetiming the radiologist & your mother too, her arm angled like a cellist’s to help me see. We are dazzled by the sight of each bone in your feet, the pulsing black archipelago of your heart, your fists in front of your face like mine when I was only just born, ten times as big as you are now. Your great-grandmother calls me Tyson the moment she sees this pose. Prefigures a boy built for conflict, her barbarous and metal little man. She leaves the world only months after we learn you are entering into it. And her mind the year before that. In the dementia’s final days, she envisions herself as a girl of seventeen, running through fields of strawberries, unfettered as a king -fisher. I watch your stance and imagine her laughter echoing back across the ages, you, her youngest descendant born into freedom, our littlest burden-lifter, world -beater, avant-garde percussionist swinging darkness into song.
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